SMART GOALS And Using Them To Help Boost Your Marketing Efforts
A lot of bands have marketing goals, and the sad part is that most bands don’t achieve them. In this post, we are going to go over some of the reasons why many bands don’t.
What Are SMART Goals
In marketing, there is a concept called “SMART Goals” that is used by most professionals. SMART is an acronym that is defined as:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timely
Let’s go over each one of these points and cover how they can be used in marketing your music.
Specific
A specific goal isn’t vague. An example of a vague goal could be “increase our streams,” while a specific goal could be “increase our streams on YouTube.”
Measurable
A measurable goal has quantities or amounts. For the above goals, they are specific, but they aren’t measurable. So, you would say, “Increase our streams to 50,000 plays on YouTube.” This is both specific and measurable so far.
Achievable
This is a key part of this concept. You might set a specific and measurable goal to “increase our streams to 50,000 on YouTube,” but is it achievable? If you’re a band releasing your second single without label support and your debut only got 100 streams, you’re probably being extremely unrealistic. However, this time you have an ad budget and you’ve hired a PR team, so you feel like 5,000 streams seems more realistic. This is both an increase and something that you feel is achievable, so you set this. Now your goal so far is “increase the streams of our next single to 5,000 streams on YouTube.” This feels doable.
Realistic
Realistic is pretty obvious. Does the goal even matter? Is it results-based? Let’s look at what we have so far: We want to increase our streams on a major platform (YouTube) to 5,000, so yes, it is relevant! So far, our goal matches all of the criteria of the SMART formula.
Timely
This is a key part of the formula. You can have everything else set properly, but if you have no “by when,” nothing will happen. If you don’t set an actual specific time frame, it is far less likely that you will achieve what you want.
For our example, we might change the goal to “Increase the streams of our second single to 5,000 on YouTube within one month.” You check over the entire SMART framework, and you see that it is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
There you have it—a way to set marketing goals! If you set your goals using the SMART formula and then work to get them done, you have a much higher chance of achieving them. Setting clear, specific, and time-bound goals is key to winning in marketing. Plus, if you keep things realistic (achievable), you have a much higher chance of actually succeeding. Setting overly high or unrealistic targets just sets everyone up for a loss.